
Qass. 
Book. 



I^UM 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN: 



A EULOGY 

DELIVERED AT AXAMOSA, IOWA, OX THE DAY OF 
TUE ISTATE FAST, APRIL 27, 1865. 



By WILLIAM G. HAMMOND. 




PUBLISHED BY KEQUEST. 



am 



DAVENPORT: 

PCBLISHIXG HOUSE OF LpSE & GBIGGS. 
1S65. 



ABKAH AM LINCOLN : 



A EULOGY 



DELIVERED AT ANAMOSA, IOWA, ON THE DAY OF 
THE ISTATE FAST, APRIL 27, 1865. 



By WILLIAM G. HAMMOND. 




PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. 



DAYENPORT: 

PUBLISHING HOUSE OF LUSB * GEIGftS. 

1865. 



EULOGY ON ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



No wish is more frequent, or more natural, to those who live 
in periods of great excitement, than that they might be placed, 
if only for an hour, far down the stream of futurity, and thus 
enabled to view the events and the men around them with the 
clear and impartial eye of history. The change would be like 
rising from amid the smoke and roar of a tierce battle, where 
all is tumult, confusion and hurry, and where the keenest eye 
and the coolest brain can know nothing but the incidents of 
its own special locality, to some lofty post of observation, in 
whose serene atmosphere we can take in at a glance the whole 
field of conflict, perceive the purpose and the result of every 
movement, and clearly discern who and where are the master- 
minds, the ruling spirits of the strife. But in the field of war 
and the field of history, such achievements are equally diffi- 
cult. No man, it has often been said, ever saw a whole battle. 
It may be doubted whether any was ever sagacious enougli to 
read the events and the men of his own time, among all the 
mists of prejudice, the cannon-roar of party strife, the shock 
of conflicting ideas and passions, so truly and impartially as 
after generations will. 

If we examine the contemporary literature of any marked 
period in human history, we are amazed to see how completely 
time has often reversed the verdict of the passing hour. Men 
who were looked on b}' their fellows as the marvels of their 
age, as the pivots upon which the history of the time turned, 
have sunk so utterly from view, that their very names have no 
longer force enough to point an illustration ; while, on the 
other hand, men whom their own contemporaries hardly 



knew, or who, at best, were regarded merely as the useful 
tools of the throned and titled great, emerge from their ob- 
scurity, and are recognized as the true guides and leaders of 
the race. Could we^ at this moment, lay aside the moment's 
prejudices and. errors, and look back on the four eventful years 
just closed with the clear incisive gaze of posterity, we might 
start with amaze to see how wrong had been our judgment, 
how grossly exaggerated or understated our opinion of the 
various scenes and actors we have beheld in this grandest of 
historic dramas. 

We have indeed seen the reputations of generals and states- 
men made and unmade with wonderful haste, and can already 
pass an almost historic judgment upon events that would seem 
of yesterday, it it were not for the rapidity with which newer 
and still newer scenes have passed over the stage in these tiftj 
crowded months. But the wisest of us yet are but childrea 
learning the alphabet, in our comprehension of the lull mean- 
ing and importance of the history we have ourselves been 
helping to make. Here and there, perhaps, we may trace a 
dim outline of some figure in that vast picture which History 
hereafter will paint, in her boldest lines and brightest colors, 
of the war for the Union. But how faintly and imperfectly 
these figures yet are seen, we may well realize when we re- 
flect that it is only within a few, very few, months past, that 
his own partisans, his most ready admirers, have begun to ap- 
preciate, in all its commanding proportions, the central figure 
of the whole group, the large brain and large heart of 
Abraham Lincoln. Not half comprehended in his full merit 
by the very party that, with a wisdom greater than they them- 
selves knew, placed him in the chair of state : trusted only as 
an honest, good-natured, well-meaning countryman, by its 
active leaders, who saw nothing in him of that plausible man- 
ner and selfish shrewdness which form the demagogue's ideal 
of successful statesmanship : doubted, carped at, ridiculed by 
unscrupulous opponents : patiently weathering storm after 
storm of popular impatience, and bearing on his own broad, 



imfalterin^ shoulders the sins of unfaithful or incapable subor- 
diates : reckoning his own fame or popularity of no*account, so 
he could but manfully labor at the task imposed upon him ; 
the President went through the greater part ot his first term, 
and even passed the ordeal of a canvas for re-election, without 
recognition or gratitude for the vast intellectual ability he dis- 
played. Had he depended for that re-election, last year, upon 
popular repute as a great man, I doubt whether he would have 
succeeded. The mass of his fellow-citizens who voted for him 
did not do it because they thought him one. It^was because he 
was the representative of a great cause, and because there was 
something in his plain downright honesty that won men's confi- 
dence, that he became the first re-elected President since An- 
drew Jackson. Had he been taken from us six months earlier, 
the American people might have blushed till their latest day, 
to think that the greatest man of this century had lived and 
died among them, unrecognized and unthanked. The marked, 
though tardy, change of public opinion since last summer, has 
spared us this reproach. None but those whose malignity no 
goodness can disarm, or those whose narrow eyes and minds 
no real greatness can penetrate, now fail to recognize the la- 
mented President as both a good and a great man, whose 
equal is not left us. And if there be one thing in which it is 
possible for us to foresee the judgment of posterity, such will 
be the rank assigned him, so long as History shall tell the tale 
of the Second War of American Independence. 

There will, indeed, always be a set of small, sharp critics, to 
say : Mr. Lincoln was not a hero of this pattern, or of that : 
Mr. Lincoln had no military genius, and would have failed 
utterly, had he led an army into the field : Mr. Lincoln was 
no orator, and could not move men's hearts by the mere magic 
of his voice : Mr. Lincoln was sadly ignorant of literature and 
the fine arts : Mr. Lincoln was very deficient in those social 
graces which charmed the country in some of his predecessors. 
He was a good, but not an extraordinary lawyer. He served a 
term in the lower House of Congress, without making an es- 



6 

pecially brilliant mark there. He has left behind him no 
books that will be the delight and the study of future genera- 
tions. 

All this is true : Mr, Lincoln was not a great lawyer, a 
great author, a great orator, or a great general : /he was simply 
a great man. He excelled in no one of the arts by which men 
in ordinary times rise to distinction, and fix on themselves the 
eyes of the world. It is not for his admirable manner of do- 
ing anything, that he will be remembered. It is for the mat- 
ter, and the weight of his deeds : for the exercise of that grand 
controlling and directing power, which moulds the destinies of 
a nation, and to which oratory, military skill, intellectual cul- 
ture, are but tools to work with on occasion. Among the de- 
fenders of the nation, he held that place which the judgment 
holds among the faculties of man, guiding, moving, or restrain- 
ing, the tongue, the arm, and all beside, according to the needa 
of the hour, and producing, out of what would otherwise be 
fitful and aimless vagaries, a steady and permanent progress 
toward the desired end. He had that measured, governed 
strength, which is neither exerted for the mere pleasure of dis- 
play, nor found lacking in the time of need : never anticipating 
or dragging forward an occasion for its exercise, but always 
ready to obey the call of duty : nevei sweeping forward, in 
the exulting consciousness of its own might, with the impetu- 
ous force, and too often with the destructiveness of an inunda- 
tion, but rising at its appointed hour, to fill its due place, 
silently and without eflfort, but as irresistible as the tides of the 
ocean. Such a nature could not be appreciated, until men had 
learned, by long and patient watching, how sure he was to 
rise to the level of the occasion ; how safe, never to pass be- 
yond it. Minds of this class are not the first to impress the 
careless observer. Their elevation is like that of the gigantic 
table lands in the heart of a continent. The traveler rises by 
such easy degrees, and he finds at the highest point such a 
vast sweep of apparent plain, that it is only after long and 
.careful observation he can be convinced that he is farther above 



the common sea-level of humanity, in a higher and purer at- 
mosphere, and nearer the heavens, than if he had clambered 
to the very summit of some isolated but relatively insignificant 
hill, whose precipitous sides and jagged peaks are the wonder 
and admiration of passers-by./ 

The utter absence of pretence and affectation in the Presi- 
dent's character, diminished his reputation with the large class 
who expect to see a great man always in statuesque attitude ; 
while it will be one of the features which, in future ages, will 
command alike the respect and the love of the world. There 
is, indeed, something peculiarly winning in the noble simplicity 
and directness with which this man went about his work. He 
was never unconscious of the magnitude of the task before 
him, and he never pretended to be so. We may be sure that 
no man felt more fully than he the length of the single step 
he made, from the obscure life of a country lawyer, in a small 
"Western town, to the chief seat of a great nation, in the day 
of its greatest struggle. He knew, as well as any man, that 
upon his conduct would depend, in great measure, the result of 
the most critical conflict through which Free Institutions had 
ever passed. He could not but know, also, that in that crisis 
was involved for himself the issue of as lofty fame, or as deep 
disgrace, as has ever yet been linked with the name of any in- 
habitant of this New World. But among all the trials and 
anxieties through which, as through clouds and thick darkness, 
his path led, there is one, at least, of which we find no trace. 
What figure Abraham Lincoln was making in the world, what 
his contemporaries said, or posterity might say, of him as an 
individual, he took no thought. We know, from his own lips, 
that he never read the comments of friend or foe on his own 
character. He had graver work to do than to look after the 
interests of any one man, though that man were himself In 
the rare instances when some misapprehension led him to ex- 
plain, it was the President, not himself, whose acts required to 
be rightly judged. Of all he has said or written in these four 
years, I find just one line, — one simple, beautiful line, — given 



8 

to a thought of his own reputation. In the short letter which 
corrected a mistake of the North American Review as to his 
policy, referring, as he was obliged to do, to the tribute of high 
admiration paid him in that article, he says: "I fear I am 
not quite worthy of all which is therein kindly said of me, 
personally." The subject is not dwelt on. No exaggeration 
of modesty, no labored effort of self-depreciation. A siiigle 
passing word; but a word that speaks volumes for the true 
modesty, the quiet, unaffected humility and dignity combined, 
of a spirit too pure and too lofty for morbid self-consciousness. 
On the other hand, no ruler ever was so frank and out- 
spoken in vindicating his subordinates from unjust reproach, 
even when it became necessary to take upon himself a part of 
the disgrace into which they had fallen. When the Secretary 
of War was made a scape-goat for the sins of the people, and 
Congress had censured him in a severe resolution, the Presi- 
dent steps forward at once to tell them that he himself " was 
at least equally responsible with him for whatever error, wrong, 
or fault was committed in the premises." Perhaps the most 
characteristic speech he ever made, was the one in which he 
defended that Secretary's successor. 

" I Am very little inclined on any occasion to Bay anything, unless I hope 
to produce some good by it. The only thing I think of just now, not likely 
to be better said by some one else, is a matter in which we have heard some 
other persons blamed for what I did myself. There has been a very wide- 
spread attempt to have a quarrel between Gen. McClellan and the Secretary of 
War. Now 1 occupy a position that enables me to observe, that these two 
gentlemen are not nearly so deep in the quarrel as some pretending to be 
their friends. General McClellan's attitude is such that in the very selfishness 
of his nature, he cannot but wish to be successful, and I hope he will, — and 
the Secretary of War is in precisely the same situation. If the military com- 
manders in the field cannot be successful, not only the Secretary of War, but 
myself, for the time being the master of them both, cannot but be failures. 
* * * * General McClellan has sometimes asked for things that 
the Secretary of War did not give him. General McClellan is not to blame 
for asking for what he wanted and needed, and the Secretary of War is not 
to blame for not giving when he had none to give. And I say here, as far as 
I know, the Secretary' of War has withheld no one thing at any time in my 
power to give him. I have no accusation against him. I believe he is a 
brave and able man, and I stand here, as justice requires me to do, to take 
upon myself what has been charged on the Secretary of War as withholding 
from him." 

I have quoted this speech at some length, because it is not 
a bad illustration of the President's succinct, homely, straight- 



forward style. Mr. Lincoln has been reproached with his lack 
of literary cultivation and polish. The style of his letters and 
messages does not show any familiarity with classical models, 
or treatises on Rhetoric ; but in the literature of the nineteenth 
century, there are few authors who can be favorably compared 
with him for precision, clearness and point in saying exactly 
what he means, nothing more, and nothing less. It is the 
complete antithesis of that sonorous mass of verbiage which 
has come to be regarded as the true ofticial and diplomatic 
style. If I knew nothing else of Mr. Lincoln, it would prove 
to me that he was no ordinary man : not even a man of talent, 
in the common acceptation of the term : but a man of self- 
sustained, original genius. There is something characteristic 
even in the quaint, involved, knotty sentences that have been 
picked out, here and there, as marks for critical pop-guns. At 
such times he seems to be thinking aloud, and places before 
you, with rare honesty, the native, unsophisticated thought, as 
it first struggled into shape in his own mind, out of a labyrinth 
of perplexities. Our only wonder must be, that amid the in- 
cessant toils and distractions of his office, these are not more 
frequent than they are. When the subject admits of clearness, 
the terse, emphatic sentences strike home like the blows of a 
battle-axe. As an antidote to that love of fine writing and 
fine talking which is the besetting sin of Young America, I 
know nothing in our jiolitical literature at all comparable to the 
little — alas ! too little, that he has left us. / 

The lack of all bombast and conventionality in his style, har- 
monized with the simple and unpretending course of his ofii- 
cial life. Among his thousands and thousands of subordinates, 
no man, perhaps, was so little elated by his rank, or assumed 
60 little factitious importance, as the President of the United 
States, the commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy. The 
hearty, off-hand, familiar manner in which he met his fellow- 
citizens, was a constant theme of criticism with those who had 
been trained under a system of official life modeled from the 
manners of plantation lords, and the social traditions of the first 
2 



10 

families of Virginia. He never forgot, probably never tried to 
forget, the habits of his Western village, or the stories he had 
heard and told while riding a Western circuit. The truth was, 
he was too completely absorbed in his gigantic task, for any 
effort at social distinction, had his tastes led him that way. 
His disregard of official. etiquette has sometimes been attribu- 
ted to his lack of early advantages. The experience of the 
•world teaches a different lesson, in regard to the comparative 
estimate put upon outward splendor by those who have, and 
those who have not, been accustomed to it from childhood, at 
least in the case of ordinary natures. Not because he had won 
his way bravely, under all disadvantages of birth and educa- 
tion, to the highest place in the gift of the American people, 
but because his nature was too pure, too noble, too manly, to 
be corrupted by the ordinary temptations of such a rise, was 
Abraham Lincoln so truly the People's President,— so frank, 
so affable, so void of petty vanity. And this character was its 
own protection. There are men to whom a certain amount of 
official dignity is absolutely necessary, as their only safeguard 
against personal contempt. But this was a want the President 
never knew. The nearer men came to him, the more they 
respected him. It was when they were least conscious of the 
rank of the President, that they were most attracted by the 
frank and open heart of the man. 

This frankness, indeed, was something more than manner,— 
more even than a moral trait; it was an element, and no small 
one, of his intellectual greatness. In this he seems to stand 
alone and unrivaled among men famous in history. We look 
among them in vain for one who avowed so freely all his 
wishes, hopes, fears, likes, and dislikes. It was not a mere 
absence of dishonest concealment. Other statesmen have been 
upright and truthful. But he alone took the people into his 
confidence, and, with a noble daring, made them sharers in 
his very doubts and perplexities. He did not affect, even by 
silence, more wisdom or more forethought than he possessed. 
If his policy was ; et unformed, his mind in doubt, his vision 



11 

limited, he said so. There was no attempt to maintain a mys- 
terious reserve, or to hint that he was governing events by a 
deep-laid scheme. The declaration lie repeated most frequent- 
ly was, that he waited for events to control his course, and that 
he refused to commit himself beforehand to any unchangeable 
policy. 

To politicians of the old school, trained in the affectation of 
omniscient political sagacity, this was foolishness and a stum- 
bling-block together. They had been accustomed to leaders 
who would sooner have confessed a lack of honesty than of 
prescience, and whose manners the poet has described with 
almost prophetic ken : 

" There are a set of men whose Ti:»age8 
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond, 
And do ft wilful stillness entertain, 
"With purpose to be dressed in an opinioa 
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit ; 
As who should say : ' I am Sir Oracle, 
And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark !' " 

No wonder that these men and their followers, in both par- 
ties, were horror-struck at such a departure from established 
usages ! No wonder that they could not recognize the sub- 
stantial wisdom of the President's course, when he laid aside 
all the outward forms in which political wisdom had been im- 
memorially clothed. He said, plainly that his mind was not 
yet made up on certain points. They groaned in spirit at the 
idea of a politician whose mind was not made up on all points, 
at all times, and under all circumstances. Sometimes he 
changed his mind : and instead of setting himself to prove, 
according to established precedent, that he had not changed at 
all, but that the whole universe had faced about, and left him 
standing consistently, he said simply: "I am wiser to-day 
than I was yesterday." No wonder that they charged him 
with weakness and vacillation. Sometimes he said : " I think 
the road we are travelling leads to such or such a point; but 
we are not arrived there yet." No wonder that the enthusi 
astic friends of progress, who are never content with travelling 



12 

the safe highway, but would always reach their object by a 
succession of leaps, complaiued that the President was dilatory 
and irresolute : that it was a sign of weakness to know which 
way the road you were travelling led, unless you were ready 
to jump at once to the end of it. 

Thus by his transparency of heart, and freedom of utter- 
ance, he lost the support of some friends, and gave handle of 
reproach to many enemies. Had a weak man done the same, 
his ruin would have been irretrievable. There seemed to be 
times when he had alienated, by this frankness, nearly all 
those practised and energetic politicians, without whom, it was 
fancied, no administration could stand. But just when ene- 
mies hoped, and friends feared, to see him fall, their eyes were 
opened, and they saw that this very plain-speaking and simple 
honesty had justly won from the mass of the Northern people 
a reciprocation of the hearty confidence which the President 
placed in them : and that, let the politicians do as they 
would, the strong arms of the people were under his chair. 
They had learned to trust Abraham Lincoln as no man had 
been trusted before, since the commencement of the nine- 
teenth century. 

It is needless, now, to defend the author of the Emancipation 
Proclamation against the attacks once so lavishly made upon 
him by over-zealous radicals, for his slowness to adopt extreme 
measures. But it may he worth while to remark, what I think 
has escaped notice :/how much the cause of Progress owes to 
the President's well established reputation for caution and con- 
servatism. It was because they felt confidence in his power 
to hold back on occasion, that the great body of the people 
felt so safe as they did in pushing forward upon the road of 
radical reform. Had his place been occupied by a chief-mag- 
istrate fully committed to extreme innovation, or from whose 
character an eager and reckless precipitancy in reform might 
be dreaded, the mass of sober thinkers who stand upon middle 
ground, and who in almost all great questions hold the bal- 
ance of power, would have been as careful to restrain as in 



13 

this case they were bold to ur^e forward. Thousands and tens 
of thousands were emancipators under Lincoln, who would 
have been conservatives under Fremont or Wendell Phillips. 
They would trust the ship of state through the dangerous 
channel, with a pilot so eminently cautious, when they would 
have held firm to the old anchorage, had he shown a feverish 
desire to make all sail. Mr* Lincoln knew well that the Hrst 
display of eagerness or impatience on his part, even in a cause 
he had so eagerly at heart as the ultimate abolition of Slavery, 
would be the signal for doubts and fears and suspicions innu- 
merable among men who were yet undecided : and he wisely 
held back till the popular mind had become thoroughly con- 
vinced of the need, and had begun to press upon him with the 
whole weight of public opinion. When that time did come, 
how willingly he took his place at their head, with what un- 
flinching will and determination he kept it, is now matter of 
history./ The very slowness with which he took new ground, 
ensured his inflexible tirmness to maintain it once taken. He 
made no move forward till he had looked over the whole field 
and convinced himself that it was a safe one ; and consequently 
there were no footsteps pointing backward in the path he trod. 
It was slow, sometimes tiresome work, waiting for the Presi- 
dent, in the language of the day, " to put his foot down." But 
once down, there were not rebels enough in the Southern Con- 
federacy, or traitors enough in the North, or devils enough in 
hell, had they all Hnked their forces in one infamous trinity of 
evil, to lift that heavy foot from ofi" the neck of the prostrate 
and writhing monster. 

My allotted time runs short, and I have yet to mention 
Abraham Lincoln's truest and best title to the rank of a great 
man, — his fearless, unspotted, transparent honesty of purpose. 
If we were still to use the technical phrases of the old schools, 
his moral grandeur might be said to rise beyond and over- 
shadow the intellectual. But I trust the time has come for a 
juster and nobler view of human character, than is implied in 
these artificial terms. The day has gone by when man's spir- 



14 

itual nature could be dressed up as two separate puppets, thus 
labeled, and supposed to be as independent of each other as 
his two arms, or as his bodily heart and brain. The day has 
gone by for that mistaken teaching which could imply, if it 
did not expressly demand, a contrast between ir.tellectual and 
moral eminence, between the great man and the good man. 
"We are beginning to learn that the two terms only mark dif- 
ferent stages of the same process of mental development : that 
the moral nature should grow out of the intellectual, as flow- 
ers and fruit do from a tree, and can have but a factitious and 
imitative development without it : and that an immoral intel- 
lect is a barren tig-tree, fit only to be cut down and cast into 
the fire. Abraham Lincoln was a good man, because his moral 
nature was in harmony with the eternal laws of Truth : he 
was a great man, because that moral nature was sustained and 
fed by a healthy and comprehensive intellect. He was great 
because he was so thoroughly good, and good because he was 
60 truly great. None but an artificial and imaginary line could 
be drawn between the two phases of his character, because the 
two were in truth one, working together in pertect unison, as 
Eternal Wisdom and Eternal Righteousness work together in 
Him in whose image he was made. 

There are other traits of that one beautiful character that 
could not be omitted in such a faithful portrait of him as His- 
tory will give. What portrait could be faithful, that did not 
show his kindliness of heart, his long-sufi'ering patience with 
evil, his large-hearted charity to all men, his ready, and alas ! 
his fatal trustfulness in a generosity and purity of soul like his 
own. But future ages shall take up the task so imperfectly 
sketched here, and by the thousands of others that this day 
are faying their brief but heart-felt tributes on his new-made 
grave. 

"Pause here I his requiem is done, 

Your feet are on bis sod, 
Death's chain is on your champion, 

He waiteth here his God. 
Aye, turn and weep ! 'tis manliness 

To be heart-broken here, 
For the grave of earth's beat ijobleness 

Is watered by the tear." 



13 

What vast possibilities of future usefulnes to his people have 
sunk into that still open grave, it is in vain to ask. Every 
thoughtful man must feel that the coming four years are fraught 
with perils no less real, and far more insidious and difficult to 
guard against, than the lour years past. It has been easier for 
human strength to meet and crush the dread assault upon the 
national temple, than it will be for human wisdom to foresee 
and solve aright the numberless and intricate problems which 
will surround the reconstruction of the shattered edifice. In 
this most arduous task, no living man could accomplish so 
much for good, as he whose wise brain an assassin's bullet has 
turned into lifeless clay. No other can be found in whom the 
people of both sections would repose, eventually, if not already, 
Buch perfect confidence. He has fallen at the very moment 
when the field had become all his own : and North and South, 
the whole Union alike, have reason to mourn him as a loss ir- 
reparable. Well might the cowering traitor cry that his death 
was the heaviest blow the South had yet received ! But with 
what a tragic fitness has this mad, suicidal, devilish rebellion 
closed its death-agony with the murder of the only man whose 
brain was large enough, and arm strong enough, to save its 
instigators from the consequences of their own crimes ! 

But no vain regret for what is still left undone must tarnish 
our gratitude for the mighty work he accomplished. " I heard 
a voice from Heaven, saying unto me: Write: Blessed are 
the dead that die in the Lord from henceforth. Yea, saith the 
Spirit, that they may rest from their labors ; and their works 
do follow them." 

" And their works do follow them .^" Suddenly taken away 
from the midst of his labors, at the very beginning of that 
glorious and abundant harvest for which he had toiled so long 
and so patiently, he shall return no more to labor or to harvest 
on earth; but his works-shall follow him to the judgment bar 
of God. No human eye shall behold Abraham Lincoln again, 
till he stands before the great white throne, in a scene from 
which the imagination sinks back appalled. But if, as we love 



16 

to think, his and our personality shall be so maintained to that 
day, that those who have been kno ^^n and loved on earth may 
be recognized and loved there, what an exchange for all hon- 
ors in this life, will be that moment when he appears to render 
an account for the many and rich talents entrusted to him on 
earth. Around him will press, not only those who have borne 
the burden and heat of the day with him here, but generation 
after generation of their children, for whom he has saved the 
fair heritage of their fathers. To them, and to the countless 
millions of a whole race lifted from bondage, he may point, 
and, if such words be permitted to any created being, say: 
" Here am I, Lord, and those whom Thou hast given me. I 
have glorified Thee on the earth : I have finished the work 
Thou gayest me to do !'' 



